In the Heights, the new Jon M. Chu film adapted from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical, is the movie of the summer, largely thanks to its massive musical numbers and impressive cast. One member of that cast is Corey Hawkins; best known for theater and projects like Straight Outta Compton and 24: Legacy, Hawkins shines in this film as Benny, the friendly radio dispatcher and Washington Heights homebody. Meant to be!...
Editor’s Note: The National Museum of Mexican Art announced that all performances of La Tía Mariela have been canceled, due to the U.S. Department of Citizenship Immigration Services denying touring visas for the cast and crew. Refunds for tickets purchased in advance are available through clata.org Destinos will also feature the final version of UrbanTheater Company’s Back in the Day: An ‘80s House Music Dancesical. The play, initially a work in progress, ran in previews over the summer, and the creative team incorporated feedback from those performances in preparation for the October 10 opening....
Maya Dukmasova The violence happened elsewhere. Forces of nature and laws of physics had converged to fling the one-ton gray Lexus so hard against a tree or a pole that the car was pinched from the passenger side with the ease of origami paper. I came across the wreckage on Wednesday evening, the first full week of the coronavirus quarantine. It was jarring to see this mangled vehicle sitting abandoned, out of context, in the deserted parking lot of Foster Avenue beach....
Youth offender population in Illinois has declined Though the number of juvenile offenders in Illinois has been going down since 1999, the Department of Juvenile Justice has continued to dramatically cut the youth population in recent years. As part of reform efforts, the department now only accepts youths posing a significant public safety risk or those for whom community placement is not an option. This story was originally published by ProPublica Illinois....
Hollywood has been disemboweling itself onscreen since the waning days of the studio system: Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) tells of a once-glamorous silent actress now sealed in amber, and Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1951) exposes an unscrupulous producer. Blake Edwards convinced his wife, Julie Andrews, to go topless in S.O.B. (1981), about a director who convinces his wife to go topless in his new movie, and Robert Altman set a new standard for anti-Hollywood bile with his star-studded mystery The Player (1992), about a studio executive being harassed by a vengeful screenwriter....
Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. In seventh grade Holvay formed his first band, the Rockin’ Rebels. Their first gig was at a go-kart shop in Lyons, with Ray Nichols on guitar, Billy Krien on bass, Dale Soltwich on drums, and Holvay on guitar....
Word came today that Lois Weisberg, the former linchpin of nearly everything that’s cultural about Chicago, died last night in Florida, where she’d been living the last few years. She was 90. Weisberg headed the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs in its various incarnations for Mayors Harold Washington and Richard Daley over a three-decade span that stretched from the 1980s to an abrupt departure in 2011. She brought us Cows on Parade, the Block 37 Arts program (now After School Matters, founded with Maggie Daley), and numerous free public music and art festivals, and instituted the original Chicago Cultural Plan....
Blackbird’s Ventriloquy, a 50-minute solo performed and created by Molly Shanahan, opens on a contrast between image and sound—the wood floor and white walls of Links Hall an empty cavern for a score by Kevin O’Donnell that presents small effects hardly heard—a melody, an engine—under a deceptively uniform layer of water rushing. There are always at least two surfaces to peruse in Ventriloquy, which Shanahan describes as meaning, etymologically, “speaking from the gut,” but which Merriam-Webster lists as an alternate for “ventriloquism,” “the production of the voice in such a way that the sound seems to come from a source other than the vocal organs of the speaker....
It’s hard to imagine what the current state of noise-rock would be like without the existence of the Jesus Lizard. Often imitated but never replicated, the heavily rhythmic and lyrically twisted Chicago-by-way-of-Austin four-piece drew the blueprint for every grimy, misanthropic outfit that popped up in the wake of its 1989 Touch and Go Records debut, Pure. Punk contemporaries such as Metz and Pissed Jeans are frequently compared to the Jesus Lizard, but even the best bands that get that tag come across as mere child’s play when stacked up to the real thing; it takes much more than a heavily distorted guitar and a yelling front man to channel the industrial throb of “Blockbuster,” the bad-vibes sludge of “Then Comes Dudley,” the explosive muck of “Seasick,” or the unsettling beauty of “Pastoral....
Courtesy of Paul Cherry’s Facebook page Paul Cherry Local singer-songwriter Paul Cherry has a gift for making catchy, invigorating pop-rock, sometimes by drawing inspiration from unexpected places—take the swooning “Breadstick Ballad,” an ode to a restaurant with a less-than-stellar reputation, Olive Garden. “Breadstick Ballad” is referenced in the middle of Cherry’s bizarre, NSFW new video for “Cherry Time,” one of the primo cuts off his recent debut EP, On Top....
Q: I’m a single gay guy in my late 30s. I’m quite introverted and a bit shy, yet I have a big sexual drive and a rich libido. I’ve always found the gay scene overwhelming. I feel my quiet ways tend to put people off, and I hardly ever get the chance to show my more playful or crazy sides, as it takes me a bit to feel comfortable to show those....
Every time I walk to Humboldt Park, which is a weekly occurrence that has kept me sane and outside during the pandemic, I’m reminded of a patch of grass that was full of laughter and community during summer 2020: It was comedy in a pickup truck. When entertainment venues shuttered in the early half of the year, artists all over the city struggled. As the summer months brought much-needed brightness, the local comedy scene got creative....
Tim Zawada began his DJ career in Chicago knowing he was an outsider. The south-suburban native had been DJing at parties while at Indiana University before graduating and moving here in 2009. Within a couple weeks, his skills had earned him a job with a local DJ company, which set him up with occasional gigs at clubs and bars, but he felt obligated to tread carefully when deciding what records to spin....
If you’ve ever wished that more music festivals were like family picnics, then you need to go to this Jackson Park house-music blowout. In the late 80s, DJs and brothers Tony and Andre Hatchett and their families began hosting an annual Fourth of July reunion barbecue behind the Museum of Science and Industry. For the 1990 gathering, they decided to treat their relatives to a day full of DJ sets with help from the three other members of their crew, the Chosen Few....
The Field Museum Two lions protect the new Cyrus Tang Hall of China. Maybe the best part of the Field Museum‘s new Cyrus Tang Hall of China, which opened Wednesday, is that it’s a permanent exhibit. It tells the story of nearly 10,000 years of Chinese history, from the Neolithic period up to the turn of the 20th century and the end of the imperial age, through 350 objects, ranging from primitive tools to 19th-century snuff bottles....
After nearly three decades, Robert Joffrey’s Nutcracker, which debuted in 1987, was starting to show its age—its opulent sets and costumes were quite literally falling apart. Artistic director Ashley Wheater admitted as much to the Reader last year; “America’s No. 1 Nut,” as the annual event was once branded, was overdue for an upgrade. The Joffrey scored a coup in hiring Christopher Wheeldon, Tony Award-winning director-choreographer of the 2015 Broadway smash An American in Paris as well as an eminent choreographer of contemporary ballet....
The Sun-Times and Tribune editorial boards covered plenty of ground in the questionnaires they put to mayoral candidates—but there was a key omission. They inquired about pensions, TIFs, taxes, crime, and economic development. And they raised other, more specific issues: Should Chicago have a casino? An elected school board? Traffic cameras? A smaller city council? A legislative inspector general? A Lucas museum on the lakefront? See our related story: “Mayoral candidates speak up about Chicago’s segregation” The two dailies aren’t alone in ignoring racial segregation as an issue in this mayoral campaign....
I remember the first time someone harassed me at work for being queer. The Center, a first of its kind resource for queer workers of all stripes, aims to empower workers to stand up for their workplace rights, particularly freedom from the discrimination I experienced that summer. As part of their mission to empower the queer workforce—almost 9.7 million people, according to the Center’s estimates—the Chicago chapter maintains a 24-hour worker’s rights hotline for queer people who are in need of assistance, also a first of its kind....
It’s time for a brief primer on the heated election for the presidency of an organization that until recently you probably never heard of—the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association. I mean, let’s be real—it’s not like the idea wouldn’t occur to him. In fact, Janice Jackson, one of the mayor’s top CPS appointees, is a voting member of the association—a point I’ll get to in a moment. So here’s another question savvy readers may already be asking: If LaRaviere is a vociferous Rahm critic, does this mean Hunter’s running as Rahm’s rubber stamp?...
If not for the longing and deep-seated dread characteristic of many dream-pop songs, artists like the Radio Dept. would float right out of our collective consciousness like a lost balloon—there’d be nothing to keep them grounded and present among the overlapping celestial washes of synthesizers and vocals if not for the foil of gloom. Blending a detached cool with Krautrock-vibing rhythms and heavy hues of synth, the Swedish duo of Johan Duncanson and Martin Carlberg create engaging and enveloping melodies....
